Authors: J. Allan Dunn
Tags: #Action and Adventure
The Griffin began to laugh. His eyes glittered back of the mask slits.
“You should have been a preacher, Seventeen,” he said. “To fling a man into eternity, unprepared? What is eternity? What preparation will serve a man after he is dead? What did you think I wanted it for—to kill more dogs? You fool. If you will not put it up as I bid you, others will. And as for you, who disobey me….”
“Others will
not!”
Seventeen suddenly shouted. “You are bound for eternity yourself!”
He whipped out from his overalls a chemist’s spatula, ground to razor edges, and leaped at the Griffin in a frantic frenzy and a desperation born of an endless degradation.
An uncouth sound broke from the lips of Quantro. It was like a yelp of satisfaction. The Griffin had not moved. He stood with arms folded in his black brocade, the leprous mask in place.
Swift as Seventeen had been, Quantro was swifter. He sprang high into the air as if catapulted. His fingers, at the end of one long arm, viced about Seventeen’s wrist, dragged down the limb with a gorilla’s irresistible strength. There was a crack of snapping bone. The arm hung useless, the spatula on the floor. With inhuman ferocity Quantro drew his own long blade from his sash and plunged it again and again into the vitals of the unfortunate wretch, kneeling over him when he fell, striking still, growling and yelping like a hyena over a still warm corpse.
The Griffin watched with his glittering eyes. Only when the puddling blood threatened to reach one of the rare rugs with which the room was furnished did he put out a foot and stir Quantro, who looked up with bloodshot eyes and slavering lips. The Griffin’s imperative gesture sent him reluctantly away, wiping his knife and his hands on the fall of his sash.
The Griffin touched a spring. An opening appeared in the center of the floor in front of his desk, widening like a camera’s diaphragm, revealing a tubular shaft. Into this the Griffin spurned the wasted body of Seventeen, with his foot consigning it to oblivion. It would be a good object lesson to those other of his slaves who would see it before they disposed of it. The penalty of disobedience.
“They all lack imagination, even the best of them,” the Griffin muttered as he picked up the spatula and examined it. “The fool was a chemist and he uses this. Now, if he had thrown acid he might have scored. Number Nine will be the one to complete my device.”
He turned to Quantro, spoke once more to him in pantomime and digital talk, patted him on his turbaned head as he passed, as he might have patted a dog who had just performed successfully, and seated himself again at his desk to await the coming of his slave.
The music swelled and diminished. The Griffin seemed in a reverie, toying idly with a griffin in gold-bronze, couched on a tablet of black onyx, until the bronze disk gave out its sonorous note once more. In response the Griffin’s features, beneath the mask, were like those of some Egyptian monarch, hawkish, imperial, and compelling. His lips were thin under the highbridged nose, his cheek bones high, his jaw lean, the whole assemblage harsh and cruel. At times his eyes seemed to give out strange lights, now crimson, then the lambent green of a wolf’s, the tawny glare of a lion’s. They played there like flickering lights of Hades gleaming in Stygian caverns, hinting at madness.
It was Manning’s conviction that if, some day, the Griffin should fall down in one of his murderous plans, the shock and disappointment to his grandiose dementia would be the complete unseating of all the machinery of his brain, eccentric, but as yet invincible.
The diaphragmatic opening to the shaft had closed automatically. Now the lift revealed itself once more and a man shambled out ahead of Quantro, a white slave whose hands were stained with chemicals, whose hair had almost vanished and whose eyes were dull. Here was an instrument who would not revolt.
IV
THE last day of the year was heralded by New York’s heaviest fall of snow for a score or more of years. It snowed all night in banks and drifts that men and machines labored vainly to dispose of through the day. Wild, icy winds from the rivers swept and eddied and spiraled high amid Manhattan’s towers. Traffic struggled hard on land, abandoned the task on the water, where the snow blew in blinding blizzard bursts and the gale wailed and blasted.
The dwelling place of Ezra Farnett was part of a modern and exclusive caravanserai uptown, on the West Side. It was built about a quadrangle. A drive surrounded shrubs, now mounds of snow, and a frozen fountain. The quadrangle was entered by two arches. Ezra Farnett’s doorway was beneath one arch, his apartment was duplex and looked out both on street and inner court.
There were watchers under the arches and in the quadrangle, watchers supplementing the regular employees of the place. These latter evaded their bitter duties, but the others, who had been changed twice since midnight, challenged the storm. They were heavily clothed and heavily armed. The fury of the gale that, at times, rushed about the quadrangle like a whirlwind, flinging the snow like foam, called for special alertness. The windows were caked and frosted and crystaled so that the lights shone dimly out.
Within, Ezra Farnett and Gordon Manning sat in the studio that was both library and music room. Manning had taken every possible precaution. He had examined the apartment, gone over the grand piano lest the Griffin might have managed to place there some infernal machine that would explode when certain chords were inevitably struck. That would be characteristic of the fiend, sure that Farnett would play some time during the twenty-four hours the Griffin had set as his life-limit.
But Manning found nothing. Farnett’s two menservants were Flemish, devoted, incorruptible. Eighteen of the twenty-four hours had passed. Six now remained. There had been no poison in the food, no attack from some hidden assassin.
But it was a night of nights for murder.
The studio was on the second floor, the windows were fastened, as well as rendered opaque by the snow; there was no way to reach them, and there were four trusted men without. Equally, the doors were barred, those that led outside and those that communicated with the rest of the building.
It was a man’s dwelling, well but not too luxuriously furnished. There were many books and a few good paintings. One carven frame contained a curious inclosure. It was a small oblong of metal, like a mirror of steel. It covered a grating through which entered certain wires, behind which was a contrivance whose intricacies were too much for Manning, though he knew its use.
It was a television transmitter that also carried sound. Farnett had not displayed its use to his guest and protector. The static was unfavorable. During the afternoon Farnett had rested. He had slept also between one and five in the morning, slumber induced by an opiate, largely at Manning’s request. He was no longer a young or even a middle-aged man, though still intellectually vigorous.
He knew, as did all New York, of the Griffin’s diabolical deeds, and somewhat to Manning’s surprise, took his warning philosophically.
“I am infinitely obliged to you,” Farnett said. “But I wonder if I would not be almost as much obliged to some one who would painlessly, quickly dispose of me? I have accomplished some things and I have paved the way to what others must inevitably finish. Your Griffin does not know how spent I am. He confers on me the compliment of imagining me his enemy because, in his perverted brain, he resents all rivals, hates genuine progress.
“My brain can still conceive, and does, but my body is tired out. I am close to seventy. One cannot renew human cylinders and furnish spare parts. I get tired—too tired even to play. I must limit myself to an hour a day at the piano. I shall play for you to-night, during our vigil. I hope, for your sake, that you may circumvent the Griffin, or even, through my departure, capture him. The man is not responsible. He is evidently a lunatic, suffering from the sins of his forbears, probably, with tissues that cannot stand the strain of his faculty of imagination. A mentality run
amok.
“He takes long to strike. Maybe the storm has disrupted his plans and thus your idea that failure will result in his own disintegration will be proved.
Selah!
So be it. It is all on the knees of the gods—and there are no gods. Divinity lives within ourselves alone.”
A clock chimed. It was seven o’clock. The old year was passing fast. Dim murmurs of the fury of the storm manifested themselves when even the thick plateglass, set in steel frames, rattled. A fine film of frost had formed, or drifted in, between the junction of the window panes. Dinner was served. Oysters, a soup of real turtle spiced with sherry, a curried fowl and a bottle of red Beaune, artichokes, no sweets, but Cheddar cheese and Napoleon brandy with the coffee. A man’s dinner, in a man’s house.
Farnett ate little. Manning did not do much better. He did not mistrust the meal, but he was convinced that the Griffin was not frustrated by the weather, that already he had planted somewhere his instrument of death, that all was devised, prepared, and that even now the Griffin was waiting, in full content, for the fulfillment of his scheme.
He glanced at the television plate and it seemed to him that something flickered over it, vague and uncertain, as if a projection sought to register itself against outside resistance.
Eight o’clock. Four hours more. Manning had not slept. He felt no fatigue. He was girded against the onslaught of the Griffin that might manifest itself at any moment,
must
do so within two hundred and forty minutes, or fail.
Farnett finished his coffee in which he had placed the century old brandy, burned in sugar.
“I shall play for you,” he said. “Then I shall lie on the couch here until midnight, with you, my friendly guardian, watching me. After that you can rouse me and we will congratulate each other. I shall live on and the Griffin, perhaps,” he added whimsically, “will be like the little leprechaun who huffed and puffed, and huffed and puffed until he blew up with mortification.”
Under the magic fingers of Farnett the piano became, to Manning, a hundred instruments. He heard the devil-drums of barbaric lands, the shaken sistra of ancient Egypt, the cithara of medieval music, lutes and flutes and Andalusian guitars. Panpipes and deep-toned trumpets, calling to battle, challenging. Rattling gourds and bawling conches as wild hordes swept on to rapine and loot. Music of love, pagan and divine. High inspiration, the paeans of the dead dynasties of gods and demigods, the shrill pipe of sybils, the rolling rhythm of martial strains.
He knew now what Farnett meant when he declared music an inspiration, a vibrational urge to those attuned to cadence. The piano, like a horizontal harp, sang to him of his own ambitions, of his longings for love, for achievement. It evoked anew the desire to open the world, like an oyster, with his sword. It spoke of combat and of peace. It ended in soft, lingering chords.
Farnett sat on the piano bench, exhausted but elated.
“So it finishes,” he said. “ ‘So fleet the works of men back to the earth again; ancient and holy things fade—like a dream.’ How it storms. To dream and not to waken, only to dream once more the vision is accomplished. Good night, Manning. I’m tired. I’m glad to have known you. I have heard of you before, of course, in war as well as in what we call peace, the period between wars when men rest and sharpen their weapons for the next encounter. And still, some of them, too many of them, keep on killing. Like our friend the Griffin. I don’t want to see another war. Man.
Homo sapiens
he calls himself. The wise one of the genus who devotes his brains to the art of destroying his kind. With the wild ape still in him. Well, there is no end to wars and the making of wars. The Four Horsemen are grooming their wild steeds, saddling up. Good night.”
V
THE house phone rang. Farnett answered it.
“Something wrong with the steam,” he said. “They want us to shut off the radiators for half an hour until they trace the leak. The engineer seems to think it’s in this section of the building. He says, and truly, that this is no weather for steam valves to misbehave. He’s coming up.”
Manning nodded. It all seemed natural enough. But he knew the Griffin. This was no night for outsiders to appear, however plausibly. His hand slid to where his automatic nested in its shoulder clip.
A knock sounded and Manning answered it. There was a grizzled, elderly man in overalls, carrying a box of tools. He had a red scar on his right cheek that looked like a scald. He touched the peak of the cap he wore.
“Evening, Mr. Farnett. Sorry to disturb you. But it’s a nasty night and we don’t want the heat to go wrong. There’s a blockade somewhere. Air in the valves, I reckon. It won’t take a minute or two.”
Manning had taken his seat again. He seemed to look at the blank oblong of steel in its metal frame, Farnett’s television producer.
The engineer fiddled with the valves, turned them off.
“Your rooms are warm,” he said. “They’ll keep you comfortable till we fix things. Can I go into the bathrooms?”
Farnett yawned, nodded. The man knew where to go. As he disappeared Manning leaned forward.
“You recognize him?” he asked.
Farnett smothered another yawn.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “It’s Sissons.”
“Excuse me,” said Manning.
He strolled to the bathroom. Sissons straightened from where he had been testing the register.
“It’s not here,” he said. “I’ll just take a look at Mr. Farnett’s bathroom upstairs. But I think the trouble’s in the next apartment. It’s vacant. They’re gone South for the winter.”
He disappeared, carrying his tools. Manning kicked off his shoes and followed him. He entered Farnett’s bedroom, on the upper floor of the duplex, halted. The engineer was in the bathroom. Manning gave him a minute, and then glided to the open door.
He saw the man standing over the toilet bowl, the hot water running. There was a cabinet back of it, with a mirrored front. In the mirror Manning saw the man squeezing out something into the bowl—a metal tube, labeled.